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Demotruk said:
Mr Khan said:

We still need some definitive proof that Prime's been disregarded as canon. Prime's story was self-contained, and therefore had no relevant impact on stories that occurred after the Phazon arc had finished, but that does not make it non-canon.

Retro themselves knew they were dicking with continuity anyway, given that their story was an insert between Metroid and Metroid II, and could not fundamentally impact the story of Metroid II (even though it sorta did, because of all the Metroids that the Space Pirates cloned in the primes)

Though Other M is also a little guilty on that point, because its story alters a few of the finer points of Metroid Fusion somewhat (notably Samus' apparent shock in Fusion that the Federation had created Nightmare, or that the Federation was cloning Ridley and the Zebesian Space Pirates, or that the Federation was breeding Metroids, all of which were treated as big revelations in that game, but all of which she knew because they did all that on the Bottle Ship)


"A little guilty"? Metroid Prime was a remarkably light touch on Metroid canon in terms of inconsistencies. However what they did expand upon, such as the canon for Space Pirates, the Federation, Ridley and of course Samus' personal history, Metroid Other M explicitly throws them out the window and a Nintendo press release calls Prime a "separate collection of games". What more do you need?

I'll grant there certainly was a conflicting message between Prime's portrayal of the Space Pirates and Other M's, given that the ones in Prime were intelligent creatures with their own culture independent from Mother Brain and Zebes, but then they also radically altered the appearance of the Space Pirates from Super's, so it could very well be that the Zebesian Space Pirates are a seperate breed that functioned differently (directly mentally enslaved to Mother Brain rather than a tight-knit group of sentient beings)

But as i said, Prime being a seperate series is more or less true, but saying that does not disregard their significance as part of the story, rather the Prime series does that itself by introducing its own overarching plot element (Phazon) that is resolved through the course of the sub-series. Indeed, Prime also resolved the problem of independent space pirates, because the independent pirates, centered on the homeworld from Prime 3, had their homeworld discovered and occupied by the Federation, so would no longer be a likely threat outside of the Zebesians who returned in Super

This careless handling of Metroid continuity is likely to continue anyway, all the moreso because of Other M's underperformance, and because the continuity's merely been a tool for the games themselves or the associated media. Other M clung to the manga because they were trying to build on something that the Japanese would likely remember and increase the game's appeal accordingly. Super Metroid had the highly incredulous plot device of the Space Pirates rebuilding even though their base self-destructed last time because they just kinda wanted to remake Metroid. Retro wanted Metroids for Prime, so the Space Pirates cloned them in spite of established canon of the species extinction by Return of Samus, and Other M aped Fusion's story because many of Fusion's plot elements (the twist of Federation experimentation on Metroids, Space Pirates, and Ridley) made for some neat plot twists to work for a more story-intensive game

The more interesting question will be where they take the story after Fusion at this point.



Monster Hunter: pissing me off since 2010.